1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for determining whether to deploy an airbag cushion, which is an impact safety device, for each passenger in order to protect a passenger more safely in a vehicle crash, and its method.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
An airbag device is a device for protecting a passenger by absorbing a physical shock caused by a vehicle crash by using the elasticity of an airbag cushion. Such an airbag device may be classified into a driver seat airbag device, an assistant driver's seat airbag device, a side airbag device and so on.
By the way, an airbag cushion deployed by introducing gas into the airbag cushion is deployed at a high speed for the protection of passengers. Thus, if a passenger is an infant or a lightweight person, they may be instead injured by an impact caused by the deployment of the airbag cushion. Accordingly, whether to deploy the airbag cushion needs to be determined in consideration of the weight of a passenger. In consideration of this, the legislation of standards for restricting the deployment of an airbag cushion depending on the weight of a passenger weighed at a passenger seat under various conditions is in progress in North American regions. Therefore, airbag device manufacturers must prepare means to satisfy these conditions for enhancement of the performance of airbag devices and for export to North American regions. For this, conventionally, four or more load sensors are installed on a passenger seat to weigh the passenger according to the seated state of the passenger, and the sum of the load values measured by the respective load sensors is compared with a reference value, to thus determine whether to deploy the airbag cushion. However, an increase of the number of load sensors leads to the problem of increasing the cost of the airbag cushion and decreasing price competitiveness. Thus, the efforts for solving this problem are in progress, but the results of research are insignificant due to technical difficulties.